


The Vault

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America (Movies), James Bond (Craig movies), Teen Wolf (TV), Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Buffy is a Spy, Experimentation, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Nazis, Pre-Canon, Snark, Snippet, So Much Snark, Super Soldier Serum, Time Travel, Unfinished, Violence, War, child!derek, disphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:14:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6142615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various unfinished stories in various fandoms, not beta read and mostly posted for the lolz. See individual chapters for summaries and warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Vikings OT3 FTW

**Author's Note:**

> Just so you know, I'm not sorry for any of this.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here we have Athelstan the student, getting weirdly flirted at by artistically inclined Lothbroks. I have no explanation for this.

+

Athelstan is a polite person. 

He holds people’s doors for them and says please and thank you and he keeps his opinion about his loud, loud, _loud_ neighbours to himself. 

He does.

He really does. 

But it is three in the morning, the walls and ceilings are thin as paper and if the couple downstairs rekindles their screaming match one more time, he will _murder someone_ because he has an important exam tomorrow morning and he only just finished cramming and the heating is off again and if he has to be cold and dream of dead poets, then that’s okay, except he _cannot sleep_ , because the neighbours keep ripping into each other at a volume that’d get them the police on their doorstep in any other part of town. 

Athelstan presses his pillow over his head, tucks his feet tighter into his thickest pair of woolly socks and prays for patience, or, alternately, lightning to strike his neighbours dead. It’s not very charitable, but he is pretty sure charity has never met three am, so that’s okay. 

He’s angry.

It’s not helping him fall asleep. 

He counts to ten.

Downstairs, a plate breaks and the blonde warrior queen he occasionally glimpses in the hallway screams in inarticulate rage. 

He pushes harder on the pillow. His ear hurts from the pressure.

The man, a fierce, tattooed thing with teeth that remind Athelstan of nothing so much as a wild animal, roars back his answer. 

There is banging, the sound of something falling off the wall. 

Elsewhere in the building, someone screams abuse. 

The alarm clock ticks over to 3:04 am. 

“I am going to murder you in your sleep, you good for nothing waste of fucking space!” the queen rages and Athelstan slams his pillow down beside him and grunts, “If only.”

“You’re completely fucking _insane_ , woman!” the animal snaps back and then something else breaks, something else bangs, and the clock says 3:06 am. 

His exam starts at eight and his entire future hinges on it. 

He gets up. He marches out of his shoebox bedroom into his even smaller living room and from there, straight out the front door in nothing but his ratty sweats, woolly socks and too large t-shirt with faded print. He avoids the suspicious stains on the hallway carpet and walks, very quietly, down the stairs and along until he finds flat 2B, directly below his. 

Then he raises his hand and bangs his fist against it three times. 

Inside, the queen stops in the middle of a truly impressive threat to the animal’s manhood.

Steps. 

The door opens. 

Athelstan is too tired to wait to be invited, just shoulders in. He’ll be mortified in the morning, but he’s desperate, sleep-deprived and stressed out of his mind right now. He has no time for mortification. 

“You two,” he snaps, stopping three feet inside the door, next to the shards of what looks like it was once a vase. “Are very, very loud and it is very, very late. Would you mind terribly having your fight at a more humane time of day and, perhaps, volume?”

He smiles and it probably looks like he’s bearing his teeth, but he can’t care. Queen and Animal (he really needs to find out their names) stand there, staring at him. Both wear even less than he does, he realizes, and wonders how they keep warm. But then, they’re getting healthy exercise down here, so maybe that keeps the blood pumping. Or something. 

The queen blinks once. Her boyfriend doesn’t. He has tattoos down both arms and along one side of his chest and his pants hang so low, a stiff breeze could make Athelstan’s day. He looks and then looks away.

Finally the queen unfreezes enough to punch him – hot guy with tattoos - in the arm. Hard. “Fantastic, Ragnar, really!” she barks, clearly even more displeased now that she knows the whole building is listening. Her voice could cut diamond. 

“I’m not the one screeching like a madwoman,” Ragnar defends, sneering. 

How they have this much energy this late as night is a riddle. 

“I am not!” she defends, before abruptly stepping into Athelstan’s space. The oversized shirt she’d wearing barely reaches the tops of her thighs. He can make out a tattoo on her left leg, large and detailed, something with scales. He looks away when he realizes he’s staring, catches her amused gaze as she leans into him. 

“Tell me, neighbour,” she says, suddenly all sugar, “what would you do, if your boyfriend of three years flat out refused to take you with him to see his parents!”

“You bitch,” Ragnar howls. “I never said that! I said _I_ don’t even want to go see them! That’s completely different!”

“Stop calling me a bitch, before I rip your balls off!”

Ragnar punches the wall with a snarl that sends Athelstan’s hindbrain into full fight or flight mode. The queen, utterly unimpressed, grabs an ashtray from an end table and aims, arm hauling back like she means to throw it _through_ someone. 

Tomorrow, Athelstan will feel the appropriate terror at being in the same room as a couple of psychopaths with anger management issues. Tonight, numb, tired, exhausted, he plucks the ashtray from her hand and flings it on the couch before pointing a finger at Ragnar. 

“Correct me if I am wrong,” he starts, still a little dazed by al the skin and rage and _lack of sleep_ , “but it sounds like you’re not on very good terms with your parents.”

Ragnar nods, looking a bit stunned. 

No fucks are being given. 

None.

“And you probably don’t want to take her along because you think they’ll ruin everything. And you,” he turns to the girl. “think the exact opposite, that he thinks you’ll be the one to ruin things.” She blinks again, surprised. If they haven’t realized yet that he’s spent the past three hours listening to every single iteration of this argument, he won’t be the one to break it to them. “I suggest you either start communicating or get therapy. Whatever you do, do it quietly. I have an exam to sit in, oh good Lord, four and a half hours and if I fail, I will probably kill myself, so please, please, I beg of you, please, have your makeup sex more quietly than usual. Please.”

With that he nods to them both, spins on his heel, almost lands on his face because _woolly socks_ and then walks out with the last shreds of his dignity wrapped around him like a shroud, fighting the urge to giggle hysterically. He just told two complete strangers how to deal with their screwed-up relationship. And he said ‘sex’ out loud. To their faces. 

The monks at the orphanage would be appalled. 

Dimly, he is aware of someone a few doors down applauding him.

He’s never been so daring before. He clears their door, their hallway, the stairs, circumnavigates the stain, slips back inside his own flat and into his bed. 

The blankets have gone cold in his absence. The clocks says 3:14 am. 

Downstairs, everything is silent. 

At 3:23 am, the bedsprings start squeaking. 

Quietly. 

+

Athelstan was wrong about being mortified in the morning. He has no time for it.

He wakes at seven and stumbles out of his flat twenty minutes later, shoes untied, hair uncombed, bag slung over his shoulder the wrong way around. It takes more than fifty minutes from here to campus. He’ll be ten minutes late, no matter what he does now and the clock is ticking. 

He steps outside his door and almost breaks his leg to avoid stepping on something small and new on his ratty welcome mat. It’s a plate. On top of it, folded over a muffin, is a piece of paper. 

It says _good luck_ in spiky, tall letters. 

Athelstan blinks at the offering, looks around for its owner and finds no-one, except the next door cat who is slinking around like she’d love to take the baked goods off his hands. He snarls at her and scoops up the muffin, kicking the plate into his flat in the same movement. He closes the door, jumps over the cat, and starts running. 

He catches the bus with seconds to spare, lands between a lady smelling of cabbage and a teenage wannabe gang-banger, who looks like he can’t decide whether to shoot or stab Athelstan in the face. He thinks of the queen in a shirt that didn’t belong to her and her boyfriend with the bearing of a warrior of old and looks down at the slightly worse-for-wear muffin in his hand. 

It’s chocolate and a bit stale, but it’s the first thing he’s eaten since lunch yesterday. 

It tastes delicious. 

+

He is only eight minutes late.

+

After the pre-exam haze and the exam-fear, the post-exam haze of exhaustion, giddiness and relief sets in. If he didn’t crash and fail spectacularly, this was the last exam of his university career. He’s done. Finished. Officially done with university forever and ever and ever. 

All he wants to do is sleep forever. 

He stumbles home, almost trips over the plate for the second time today, strips off his panic-sweaty clothes and drops onto his lumpy mattress. 

Six hours later, he startles awake with a gasp, realizing who the muffin was from and that he did not, in fact, dream going downstairs and yelling at his intimidatingly hot and aloof neighbours.

He gropes around for his pillow, finds it on the floor and promptly tries to smother himself with it. 

+

It takes him two days to work up the nerve to go and apologize. In his defence, he spends half that time sleeping off the stress of the last couple of months, but still. They are gorgeous and vicious and half the building thinks they are either porn stars of serial killers or, possibly, both, and he barged into their flat and yelled at them both like some kind of sleep-deprived madman, which, okay, yes. 

But that’s not who Athelstan is. He is polite, friendly, shy. He was raised by men of God and he believes in being kind. 

Brother Gunther, an old, stooped German, had a saying that didn’t translate well: What you shout into the forest comes back. It’s about echoes and behaviour and the Golden Rule and Athelstan believes in that, too. 

Except, he thinks, in this case the forest started screeching, roaring and howling before he ever uttered a single sound, so he was possibly not completely in the wrong, but. Brother Gunther would be disappointed in him. 

So he washes the plate, steels himself, and walks downstairs. He’s even wearing clothes this time. He knocks politely and half hopes no-one is home. 

Of course, he’s not that lucky. 

The door opens just as he’s about to turn away, revealing the queen with glasses on her nose and a pencil stuck in her pale hair. She’s dressed, too. It’s nice. 

“Hello, neighbour,” she says with a small twist of her lips when he stares at her dumbly for a second, like the rabbit in front of the snake. 

He thrusts the plate in her face. “I think this is yours,” he tells her. He sounds like a nervous twelve-year-old. 

She takes it from him with another quirk of the lips. “Thank you,” she allows. “We’re running low.”

Athelstan takes a deep breath. “With that plate also comes an apology. I was over the line, barging into your flat and telling you what to do. It was rude and terribly inappropriate. Please forgive me.”

Her head cocks to one side. “You actually mean that,” she realizes after a minute of silent fidgeting on his part. 

He nods so hard his head might fly off. “Of course.”

She nods, too, just once. He’s so jealous of the way she conducts herself, perfectly in control, that he wants to weep.

“I’m Lagertha,” she tells him. “You should stay for dinner.”

He can’t help it. He blurts, “Lagertha and Ragnar?”

She chuckles. “Yes. Ragnar says we were fated. No-one else would have people with names like ours.”

And because sometimes he does have a sense of comedic timing, Athelstan holding out his hand and offers, “Hello. I’m Athelstan.”

Lagertha laughs out loud. Then she shakes his hand and uses it to draw him inside, despite his protests. “Now you have to stay and meet Ragnar properly. He’ll love you. And we owe you an apology.”

“No, please, the muffin…”

“Was stale and store-bought and not a very good apology. You looked wrecked when you came down,” she declares and pulls him along to the sofa, where she takes him by the shoulders and shoves him down to sit. A laptop and a myriad of notebooks and sketchbooks are open on the battered old coffee table. She shoves everything into a pile. “I’m a graphic designer,” she says, “freelancer, so I work from home, mostly. Excuse the mess.” She sits down next to him because there is really nowhere else to sit. “Tell me about your exam. Did you pass?”

He wants to protest, tell her he only came to apologize, that he has plans, but she gives him a look over her glasses and all thoughts of escape die a quick death. Lagertha, he thinks, does not like being told no. And why would she? She doubts anyone has the balls to even try. 

So he answers her question. Promptly. 

+

Ragnar comes thundering into the flat an hour later, cursing about this and that before he even clears the entrance and stopping as soon as he sees they have a guest. 

He stops and a wicked smirk crosses his face. “Are we to get another lecture?” he wants to know and Athelstan turns cherry red. 

Lagertha laughs. “He brought back our plate, which is a good thing, because now we have enough to eat from.”

Ragnar snorts and swoops in to kiss his girlfriend. It’s filthy and far too close, so Athelstan scoots away as far as he can and tries not to watch. They have interesting sketches tacked up on the far wall. They look original. 

“And whose fault is it we only have three plates left?” Ragnar asks as he finally pulls back. His lips are kiss-swollen. 

There is a sketch of a dragon in flight that looks breathtakingly real. 

Lagertha follows his eyes and explains, “Ragnar is a tattoo artist. Those are all his. Good, huh?” 

He nods, then jumps as she smacks her boyfriend on the arse. Hard. “Go cook dinner, he’s staying,” she announces and Ragnar rolls his eyes and yanks on a loose curl of her hair, but disappears into the bedroom to change and then shortly starts puttering around the small kitchen.

“You really don’t have to,” Athelstan starts again, but all that gets him is twin looks of scorn and raised eyebrows.

“You’re terrifying,” he blurts, and then promptly slaps a hand over his face. Ah, there is the long awaited mortification. 

Ragnar’s laugh is deep enough to be felt to the bone. “And yet, you’ve braved the lion’s den not once, but twice. Respect, Priest.”

“Priest?”

The older man points at the cross Athelstan wears. “I’ve never seen you without it. Are you not a priest?”

He’s not sure what to address first, the cross, or the fact that, apparently, Ragnar has noticed him before the other night. “Hardly,” is what he finally settles on. “The orphanage I grew up in gives a cross like this to every child who leaves. It’s good luck.”

It’s a piece of home, of good memories, a token of a faith he’s never quite taken to but always found comfort in. Something familiar in a world where he is, literally and absolutely _alone_. 

Ragnar stops in the middle of chopping an onion with a wicked looking knife to study Athelstan for a moment. There is no pity in his gaze at the revelation about Athelstan’s childhood, only consideration. “I think I will call you Priest, anyway.”

Lagertha kicks her legs up on the coffee table. “His name is Athelstan,” she informs the room at large and, like she promised, Ragnar’s eyes light up.

It starts a discussion about names and origins and they both reveal that they have Swedish roots. Ragnar’s parents immigrated before he was born, while Lagertha lived in Uppsala until she was eight. They didn’t realize that they both have distant family living within miles of each other until they were dating for over a year. 

Conversation flows from there and before he realizes it, Athelstan is helping Lagertha clean up after dinner, still talking easily with both of them. They have little in common with him, at first glance, artists, both of them, and he the boring student of linguistics, whose life’s dream is working in a library and having five cats, but somehow, Lagertha and Ragnar keep him talking, talking, talking. 

“And the next time,” Lagertha says as he finally manages to extricate himself, “just bang on the floor when we get loud.”

He giggles a little, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’ve tried that,” he tells her, standing in the open doorway. “You never hear me.”

And then he’s gone, Ragnar’s roaring laughter following him all the way back upstairs.

+

He honestly expects that to be it. They have their lives and he has his and they might greet each other by name now, but really, they have little in common, despite a nice evening, and what would they want with him anyway. 

It’s not.

A week after the dinner, there is a hard knock on his door and when he opens, he finds Ragnar standing outside with a pissed look on his face and a bag slung over his shoulder. “I’ve locked myself out,” he snarls, “and Lagertha is with a customer. Can I wait here?”

And Athelstan finds himself stepping aside almost without thinking and a moment later he has a tall, tattooed warrior king sitting on his sagging sofa. He’s not used to having guests. 

He bustles around, clears some of the detritus left over from cramming sessions back onto the shelves that line the entire room. Then he offers Ragnar something to drink and realizes he only has water and leftover apple juice. 

“Water’s fine,” Ragnar announces and stands to peruse the bookshelves. “What’s your favourite?” he asks, tilting his head this way and that, like he’s trying to figure out Athelstan’s system. 

(There isn’t one. He sorts roughly by genre and then by preference, or year, or connection between books. There are clusters of one subject here and there and the occasional notebook tucked in between.)

Athelstan hands him his glass and walks over to the shelf closest to the bedroom there. There, on eyelevel, he keeps his favourites and, on a whim, he tucks one of them out from between the others. 

Anne Carson.

Ragnar plucks it out of his hands and turns it over, studying the cover with the volcano, the praise on the back. He opens it. “Autobiography of Red. This is poetry,” he announces. 

“Epic poem,” Athelstan corrects. “It more a story told in verse. Like the – “

“Greeks,” Ragnar finishes for him. “What’s it about?”

“A monster, mostly,” Athelstan hedges. “Trying to find your place in the world. She uses a lot of religious imagery. A lot of her work is retellings of older tales, from the bible, or antiquity. I like to see how many references I can find.”

It’s what he does for fun. He knows it’s boring, but he finds comfort in the familiar tales he was read as a child, twisted in new and interesting ways. 

Ragnar laughs, suddenly, and Athelstan, taken aback, reaches for the book. He’s revealed too much. But Ragnar refuses to release it, shaking his head. “It suits you, Priest. Personally, I prefer the Norse myths. More blood and battles.”

He twists his left hand to reveal a tattoo reaching from his wrist almost to his knuckles. It’s Thor’s hammer, the head spreading onto the back of his hand, artfully detailed. “I did this myself,” he announces. “God of Thunder. He’s a good god to worship.”

With that he turns and makes his way back to the sofa, starting to read without another word. Athelstan watches for a moment, then gives up, grabs a random book and joins him. 

Some time later there is another knock and Athelstan looks up to find they’ve been reading for over an hour. Ragnar meets his gaze, grins widely and goes back to his book. Rude. 

Lagertha stands on the other side of the door, her laptop case slung over one shoulder, a bag of Chinese take-out in hand. She busses a kiss on his cheek as she slips past him asking, “Where are your forks?”

“You…,” are invading my flat, brought dinner for me, intend to eat here, are very rude, have no sense of boundaries, are treating me like an old friend, confuse me terribly. He says none of those things. “Second drawer on the left.”

She drops her bag on the table, rubs an affectionate hand over Ragnar’s shaved head as she passes him and finds the forks on the first try. Then she shoves a random container into his hands, sits down on his rickety kitchen chair and says, “Thank you for minding Ragnar. He chews on the furniture if left alone too long.”

+

Ragnar takes the book without asking.

+

The next day, Athelstan has a job interview. Since he’s still waiting for his actual graduation and certificates and all that, and quit his last job right before the exams to get through them with his head in the game, he needs something to tide him over. 

There is a coffee shop about ten minutes’ walk from his flat and they are hiring. The salary is enough to make rent and eat, there’d be practically no commute and the hours are good. He wants that job. 

So he puts on one of the few neat shirts he owns and goes to be interviewed by a pimply twenty-year-old who has ‘junior manager’ written on his name tag instead of an actual name. 

Athelstan is only twenty-five, but he feel ancient next to the snot-nosed kid who reads that Athelstan has studied literature and linguistics and starts lording all his ‘work experience’ and worldliness almost immediately. 

Still, after a test run at the machines (this is not his first job, no matter what the kid thinks, he paid his way through university somehow, didn’t he?), he is hired and told he starts tomorrow, ten sharp. 

“If you’re late, you’re fired,” the junior manager calls after him as he leaves. He waves in acknowledgement and walks home. 

He does a load of laundry so he has clean clothes to wear and starts straightening the flat because it’s overdue. Around dinnertime, there is a knock on the door and he thinks, vaguely, that he’s never had as many visitors as in the past twenty-four hours. 

Since that makes all of three, he decides never to tell anyone. 

It’s Lagertha, like he half knew it would be, her glasses jammed back on her nose, curious expression on her face. “So, did you get the job?”

He mentioned the interview in passing the night before and, apparently, she remembered. He holds up the standard contract with two signatures at the bottom, nodding and smiling. 

She hugs him and stays to chat a while before making her excuses. She’s working on a big project and only wanted to see if he needed consoling. He’s strangely touched, wishes her a good night. 

“We’ll celebrate on the weekend,” she tells him as she goes, disappearing into the stairwell before he can protest. 

+

 

... And then they bone.


	2. American Buffy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A verse in which Buffy falls through a portal and lands in the Alps, circa 1941. Guss who finds her?

+

Bucky refuses to leave.

He’s in bad shape, shaking, stumbling, barely keeping his eyes open, but he refuses to leave, squirming in Steve’s hold, twisting away from his hands.

“No,” he says, “no, no.”

He runs toward the explosions, not away.

In the end, Steve stops trying to stop him and just follows, the way he’s always done, and twenty steps down the corridor there’s a door Bucky slams himself into, falling onto the lone guard left behind, beating on him with drunken precision.

Eventually, the guard stops fighting back.

“Hey now,” Bucky says, low and slurred, just a little, not enough, not nearly as much as two minutes ago. “Hey now, pretty thing. You need a ride out of here?”

In the dark, dirty cell at the far end of the room, something stirs. A girl laughs and then there’s a face pressed against the bars, dirty and haggard, hungry and drawn.

Her hair was golden once and her smile must have been lovely, Steve thinks, horror sinking in his gut. She closes her eyes for a second, savoring something. 

“You’re the voice from the next room,” she says, and then points toward a hook by the door. “Keys.”

Steve throws, Bucky catches and then she’s falling into his arms, legs like a colt’s, long and unsteady.

Steve has no idea how she got here, an American girl in a Nazi lab, but the look of her, half-naked and falling, will stay with him.

Always, always stay with him.

“Hey, pretty,” she says, a hand on Bucky’s face, soft, gentle. “I was starting to think you were just a voice.”

Bucky stills her hand on his face, holds it there, smiles sweetly. Steve looks away. 

“We need to go.”

+

They stumble down endless corridors together, keeping each other upright and gaining speed, gaining balance with every step. Bucky’s gaze clears as Steve watches and the second time they run into guards, the girl kneels and strips both of the knives from his belt and boots. She leaves the gun in the dirt, twists the blades between nimble fingers.

“Who are you?” Steve blurts.

She cocks her head at him, stepping out of the way of Bucky searching the corpse for spare ammunition. Her expression is as sharp as the knife in her hand. 

“I’m a lab rat,” she answers and then spins to kill a man before he fully makes it around the nearest corner.

+

They kill their way out of there and Steve can’t remember the face of a single one of the men he murders because they all wear masks.

They have no faces.

Bucky and his men, the girl from the basement, they have faces.

Then Schmidt rips off his and nightmares do come true. 

“Mädchen,” he says to the girl. “I should have killed you where I found you.”

“Yes,” she agrees. She’s run out of knives to throw, so she just stands there. She’s wearing a jacket she stole off another corpse. “You should have.”

+

Her name, she says, as they trudge through the snow toward safety and salvation, is Buffy.

Her name is Buffy and they took her prisoner many months ago. She doesn’t know how many, only that it was spring when they locked her into that cell.

“Why?”

She looks at him sideways and easily matches his stride. “Bucky says you were small when he saw you last. Scrawny.”

He nods.

“They made you… better, the way the Nazis did Schmidt.”

“No. Not like him.”

“But you’re better.”

“I’m stronger,” he corrects. 

She shrugs, fluidly. “You were made,” she tells him, reaching for a low hanging branch. It’s too thick for her to fully wrap her fingers around. She breaks it like it’s kindling. “I was born.”

+

They sleep huddled together against the cold, three, four men under one of the few blankets they took with them from the cells. 

Buffy blinked at the snow when she first set foot outside, surprised. She didn’t know it was winter.

She lies between them now, her head buried in Bucky’s chest, her body a small furnace. She burns like Steve does now, constantly hot. She’s the first person he met since the Serum that doesn’t feel cold.

Bucky is the second, not quite as hot, but warmer than he should be. With the three of them curled together, it’s not cold at all. 

“What happened to you?” Steve asks, quietly, his hand at the nape of his best friend’s neck, needing to know he’s there. Solid. Alive. 

Buffy snuffles against his neck and pretends to be asleep. He can hear her heartbeat, steady as a drum but not slow enough for sleep. Beyond the next copse of trees, a man is relieving himself. He wonders if Bucky hears that, too, or the men snoring beyond that, the howling of a wolf, miles and miles away. 

Bucky shakes his head. “They tried to make… something.” He smirks humorlessly into the dark. Somewhere, a soldier cries out in his sleep. His shouts are muffled by his companions hands. “You. Only… browner.”

Against his chest, a dirty blonde head bobs. “Is that even a word?” she asks.

Bucky tangles his fingers in her hair, pushes her back down. “I could hear her, through the ventilation,” he adds. “We talked. There were… a lot of guys before me.”

“You made it longest,” she whispers. “You were the last. Are.”

Steve wonders if the inability to speak in whole sentences stems from trauma or whatever was done to them. He doesn’t ask.

When they finally fall into shallow sleep, he keeps watch.

+

Buffy can’t explain where she comes from.

Rather: She won’t.

“I’m the only one,” she tells them, over and over again, when they ask if there are more, if they would aid the Allied Forces in the War. “I’m the only one.”

Her gaze never even grazes Bucky, across the tent, getting his own debriefing.

After the infirmary tent, the meetings, the shouting, the praise, they give Steve a room in the underground offices in London. A room and two freed lab rats, not quite acclimatized to the world again, not quite right. 

Bucky greets Steve with a hug and a squeeze, Buffy slinks in after him in borrowed pants and a blouse, picking at both. She refused to wear a skirt. 

They sit on Steve’s narrow cot, shoulders touching and he realizes that, whatever happens now, it’s not Bucky and Steve anymore.

There’s a girl with them now, for better or worse, grown into the cracks Hydra managed to make in Bucky. 

Buffy spent something close to eight months in a cell. 

Bucky’s men spent a month in those pens, like animals.

Bucky spent three weeks down in the basement lab, strapped to a table.

Buffy spent every night of those three weeks whispering to him to keep the silence at bay.

And now here they are, side by side in ill-fitting clothes, looking at him. Waiting.

Heroes, Steve thinks, are supposed to save people, not salvage them.

+

Steve never learns how she does it, but when their marching orders come, Buffy is right there with them.

“I’ve got eight months of my life to take back,” she says, tracking Colonel Philipps with her eyes as he paces the room, yelling.

She slouches in the uncomfortable chairs they’re sitting in, legs crossed at the ankle. Something wry crosses her face. “And it’s not like they’ll let me walk away.” Her lips twitch. “Not while I’m the only one.”

+

They call the new unit Captain America and the Howling Commandos. 

Unofficially.

“Sounds like a band,” Buffy mutters, trying to refuse accepting the gun DumDum is trying to hand her.

“You need to learn, lady,” DumDum grumbles.

She sighs, rounds on him and grabs the gun, firing it one-handedly at the target down the range. Four go in the head, two in the heart. She hands back the gun, grabs a hold of Bucky and demands, “Lunch.”

+

He finds them kissing in Bucky’s bunk after hours, the day before they’re set to deploy.

He stands in the doorway, watching her climb into his best friend’s lap, nails raking over his shoulders and neck like she means to leave a mark, leave something of herself. Bucky presses bruises into her hips through her thick clothes and there is something desperate, something hungry about them.

It’s not the first time Steve has caught his friend with a dame, but it’s the first time he can’t make himself look away, for fear that they’ll disappear if he does. Both of them. 

That’s new. 

He must make some kind of noise, or perhaps Buffy can hear his heartbeat across the empty room, but suddenly their heads both turn toward him, eerily synchronized, and they stare at him.

He knows, intellectually, that the cells, the labs, bound them together, somehow. They survived with nothing but each other to cling to, survived horrors neither of them ever speaks of.

Steve felt the pain of the Serum and the radiation for minutes. They were down there, bound and helpless, for a lot longer. 

There are still traces of badly healed track marks on Bucky’s arms. Buffy, Steve has learned, doesn’t scar. It makes him all the more worried for her. 

Something tied them together and it doesn’t seem strange or wrong for them to get together in this way. And anyway, in war, things are different. Or so Peggy tells him. 

Rules don’t apply, sometimes. 

Whatever it is that makes a strange girl fall in on Bucky’s free side so easily, Steve understands it. But faced with it, two sets of eyes boring into him, their hands still moving on each other, he can’t stand it.

So he runs. 

+

The first enemy contact they have is a small squad of German soldiers trying to loot the farm they’ve set up shop in. 

It takes less than two minutes and at the end of the rush, blood still throbbing in his ears, Steve counts five men dead from knives, not guns. 

“Did you know,” Buffy asks, idly, “that until that damn place, I’d always tried to avoid killed humans?”

Not really knowing what to do, he raises a hand and slowly, carefully, puts it on her shoulder. She and Bucky seem to be touching all the time, like it settles them, somehow. Buffy tenses, then relaxes in under his touch. 

It’s the best he can do. 

He thinks it might be enough. For now.

+

“They tried to make me like her. Like you, I guess,” Bucky drawls when Steve finally corners him, late one night when they both share a watch.

Steve doesn’t sleep more than four hours a night anymore. All part of the package.

“They… tried to make a serum out of her blood and DNA and then they shoved it into us. There were others, before me. Guess they hadn’t quite figured out how to make it work back then.” He shrugs, fluidly. 

“I’m not… not like you and her.” Crooked grin. “But I get by. And I… Christ, Rogers, I can _feel_ her now. Like I have a part of her. Inside. Every time I touch her, it’s like a live wire.”

“Thank god,” Steve blurts before he can stop himself, eyes wide in the dark. Neither of them needs lights to see. “I thought that was just me.”

+

Peggy waits for them by the docks when they return from France for the first time, and she makes sure to stay beside him all the way back to base.

They fall back a little, letting the others get ahead and finally, when he’s sure everyone’s out of earshot, Steve scrounges up every bit of courage he has and asks, “Would you like to have a drink? With me? Later?”

He’s stammering and blushing but he doesn’t hunch into himself, meeting her eyes squarely and hating how he can’t talk to girls at all. Well, girls who aren’t Buffy. But Buffy’s different, somehow. 

He shouldn’t be thinking about his best friend’s girl right now. 

Eventually, he finds the courage to look up from studying his shoes, only to find Peggy smiling her eternally red smile with the brilliance of a sunrise. 

“I would be delighted, Captain,” she announces, then pauses, adds, “I thought you would never ask.”

And Steve smiles back.

+

In the middle of battle, there is rarely ever time to consciously watch more than the next enemy coming for him, so Steve is aware that Buffy must be a terror, especially in close range combat, but he only ever sees the results of it, the soldiers with slit or broken necks, with stab wounds straight into the heart. Quick, merciful deaths, really. 

He doesn’t really think about how they get like that – it’s war – until he gets trapped under a truck upended by an explosion and can’t free himself. Until the fight ends, all he can do is watch and call out the occasional warning, although his team has the Nazis well in hand, really. 

Still, he hates being useless. 

Buffy dances past him, a blade in each hand, and throws him a grin, casual as can be. “Lazy jerk,” she teases as a man in uniform launches himself at her back. She doesn’t even turn, just slams both knives up and behind her, digging them deep into his guts. 

She spins, blades flashing, slits his throat and nimbly dances out of reach of the resulting spray. She completes her turn on her knees, catches sight of Bucky getting caught in a pincer move and throws one of her weapons. It sinks into an enemy’s neck, killing him instantly. 

She doesn’t wait for him to land, just launches back to her feet and races towards DumDum in trouble, grabbing a spare knife from her belt as she goes. 

Steve counts and by the end of it, thirteen of the thirty two Germans are dead by her hand. 

She stops in the middle of the battle field, weapons poised and stares hard at her surroundings. Listening, he thinks, for stragglers. Something moves in the bushes, probably Nazi trying to get away, to run for his life. 

Without hesitation, Buffy throws another knife, killing the deserter, too, ruthlessly and carelessly. Steve can see her reasoning behind it – the man would have given away their position, most likely – but he doesn’t like it. 

The men right the truck and pull him out from under it. His left leg is broken, but Buffy sets it deftly, not bothering to splint it. They heal at just about the same rate and she has years of experience on him. He trusts her judgment. 

When she’s done, she tells the boys to make camp somewhere close by, because they’re stuck here for the next six to eight hours. They move away, grumbling because no-one likes sleeping next to corpses, but they do it. 

Half an hour later, Buffy helps him hobble toward the camp they set up a short walk away. 

They pass the dead man in the bushes. The knife got him in the back, as he was fleeing. “You could have let him go,” he says, quietly, so Bucky, a few yards ahead, doesn’t hear. 

She nods, but doesn’t speak. 

“You said you… disliked killed humans before… this.”

A shrug. “They started it.” Cold and calm and clinical.

Steve wonders why that seems so terrifying to him. Is it because she holds his best friend’s heart in her bloodied hands, or because she doesn’t look like a stone cold killer?

Or maybe it’s just because he doesn’t want to become her. 

+

He knocks, and when Peggy calls for him to enter, he quickly slips into her room, afraid of being seen, of having the foreign unit they are working with spread tales about one of the only two women around. 

God knows, most of those boys make no secret of how they think Peggy and Buffy got to be where they are. Only the Commandoes have learned better by now.

Inside, he finds not only one of them, but both, sitting on Peggy’s bed, soft, for once, and blurred in something other than battle fatigues. They wear loose dresses borrowed from the daughter of the farmer whose house they are using at the moment. She gave them out with a wink and both dames grinned back, fierce like they were going into battle. 

Now, they sit opposite each other, cross-legged and barefoot and Peggy is carefully applying some of her precious red lipstick to Buffy’s lips. Her cheeks are already rouged, her eyes darkened with kohl. 

Steve doesn’t know much about women’s things, but he knows that Peggy has been saving the little tin box that now sits open on the bed between them for special occasions. She puts the lipstick back, makes Buffy roll her lips over her finger and then smiles. 

The smaller woman gets up, makes her way toward the dresser and bends to study her reflection in the little, brown-flecked mirror. 

She looks delicate, suddenly, instead of fragile, her sun-deprived skin artful instead of wan, her cheeks, sunken from malnutrition, seems rosy, for once. She looks, for the first time since Steve has met her, a bloody wraith at Bucky’s shoulder, like a girl. 

Just a girl.

“Oh,” she says, softly, and behind her, Peggy smiles.

“I told you, darling.”

As one, they both turn to Steve, finally, who feels like an intruder. Buffy cocks her hip, her usual mask of self-assurance slipping back onto her face. But her eyes remain open, remain defenseless. Waiting.

“You’re beautiful,” Steve dutifully tells her. 

It’s the truth.

+

“So,” Jim starts around the low campfire, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, headed to intercept a train in the Alps. “What are you going to do when you get home?”

It’s an old game, one they play regularly. Go home to their wives. Kiss their kids goodnight. Travel. Find a girl. Find a good job. Buy a house. Sleep in soft beds. 

Usually, Steve looks at Peggy, blushes and shrugs. But tonight, something’s different. Peggy isn’t with them, for one. And there’s blood on his uniform from an earlier fight and he’s cold and tired and he says, “I’m not really sure Captain America gets to retire.”

Because, as people like to remind him, the serum running through his veins is property of the United States Government and he does what they tell him to. After what feels like a century out here, behind enemy lines, always fighting, he knows better than to think Captain America will ever not be needed. 

There is an awkward shuffling among the men, a few hesitant nods. Yeah, probably, poor bastard. 

“What about you two?” Dernier asks, refocusing everyone’s attention on Bucky and Buffy. The two Bs. Since Dum Dum caught them in a barn a few days ago, they’ve been needled endlessly. Their relationship wasn’t exactly a secret before, but now it’s open season. “Getting married?”

He asks casually, but both Buffy and Bucky immediately get a wide-eyed look about them, half confusion, half terror. Bucky, Steve remembers, never wanted a wife and kids. He wanted to see the world, to do something amazing. 

Some days, Steve thinks Bucky would have made a far better Captain America than he ever could. 

He tries to imagine them in a house outside the city, or even in an apartment in Brooklyn. Bucky working at some office, Buffy staying at home, a baby in her arms, another one on the way. Even before he’s halfway done painting the scene in his mind, a revolver makes it way to Buffy’s hip, a rifle onto Bucky’s back. Their neat kitchen turns into a rundown safehouse and their child into a bedroll, a kit, a bomb. 

“I go where Stevie goes,” Bucky finally answers, too late and when all eyes turn on Buffy, she shrugs, hollow-eyed. Why not?

+

“Do you have a family? Where you come from?” Steve asks, later, sharing a watch with her, Bucky dozing between them. 

He’s never thought to ask before. 

She turns to look at him in the dark, a pale ghost against while snow. Bucky snuffles in his sleep and neither of them react, intimately familiar with the sound. 

“A sister,” she finally answers, like sharing a secret. “Friends. My mother is dead, my father left a long time ago.”

“A husband?”

She chuckles and Bucky slaps at her thigh. She catches hit mitten-ed hand in hers, holds it. “Where I come from, marriage is optional. Gender equality is a thing. It’s not perfect, but compared to this? It’s paradise. I was the head of an international company, fighting the good fight and trying to regularly visit my sister in between. I haven’t had a relationship in a long time.”

+

... Lookie, I stopped mid-scene. Wow. Anyway. I'm not sure if they ever bone in this. They might just be all platonic and shit. Either way, Bucky never dies and he and Buffy get to 2010 the log way round, reunite with Steve and probably adopt a few puppies. And you just know Buffy and Bucky are Tony's godparents, because reasons.


	3. 00Slayer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Buff is a CIA agent, Bond is himself, Q suffers greatly and nothing really happens.

+

“Do you accept the assignment, 007?” the new M asks and Bond looks up from where he was scanning the file handed to him with a pout. 

After almost a year working together, he’s comfortable enough with his new boss to ask, “Do I have to?”

The mission sounds simple enough but he has absolutely no desire to work with a CIA agent as proposed. Americans. 

Bond is all for guns and violence, don’t get him wrong, but there’s an art to it that the Yankees just never seem to have mastered.

M’s lips quirk, briefly. It’s a tell the old M would have never let show, but he’s learning not to compare the two, much as he misses the old hag. “I’m afraid so. Unless you’d rather babysit an ambassador while I have a single-0 do your job for you?”

Right in the professional pride. Damn him.

“Very well, sir,” Bond demures. They both know it’s fake. “I’ll drop by Q-branch and then be on my merry way.”

He goes.

+

Bond plugs the obnoxious white headphones in his ears one after the other and slides the phone they’re attached to into the pocket of his bespoke trousers. It’s turned off, but the illusion allows him to make use of the earwig underneath. These days, no-one cares if you’re quietly muttering to yourself, as long as those blasted white things are involved. 

Bless the modern age. 

Bond feels like a dinosaur. 

“Alright then, Q. Brief me.”

He sits back in his seat outside a café somewhere in South America and waits for Q to stop bitching about “not being your bloody secretary, Bond, read your own briefs”, and start spoon feeding him the intel anyway. 

Of course he could read the files. Of course he _has_ read the files. But Q’s making it so easy. 

“Alright, you illiterate blunt instrument,” his handler starts, “your mission is search and retrieve, officially. You are to work with a CIA agent you will meet momentarily to retrieve a chemical formula for a weapon that makes Anthrax look like the flu, before it can be auctioned off at a nearby holiday resort. You are to pose as a couple to get in, get the formula from its inventor and then hand it over to the Americans. At which point, agendas stop correlating. MI-6 would prefer it if you didn’t. Destroy it, if you are given the chance at all. We do not need more chemical weapons in anyone’s hands.”

Standard fare, so far. 

“Background?” Bond asks, folding his hands across his stomach and smiling at the waitress.

“Back in 2002, when the whole world was looking to the Middle East, a scientist by the name of Margaret Walsh decided it was time to cut ties with her government sponsored project and, frankly, ran off with her newly invented compound like a thief in the night. She disappeared for eight years before popping up again in South America. 

“It’s taken until now to ascertain that she has the formula with her and that there are no copies in existence. The last of which is a morsel that was provided by our side of the pond, which is why the Americans have agreed to let us contribute an agent to the operation. They think it’s none of our business that one of their own is running around with a deadly weapon in her handbag, ready to plunge the world into another plague-age.”

It’s a toss-up then, on who’s going to be more annoyed with this arrangement, Bond, or his temporary partner. 

“The agent you are going to be working with is the American equivalent to you. That is to say, blunt and occasionally useful.”

“Aw, Q, you know I love you, too.”

He gets ignored.

“Summers is young, but quite proficient at what she does. Her specialties are retrievals and wet work. She has a reputation of being a bit of a prodigy, as well as notoriously difficult to work with. Her handle ID is Slayer, of all things. How tacky. You two should get along marvellously, 007.”

The last is said with a distracted air, like something’s caught Q’s attention. Bond is proven right when, a moment later, the swot supplies, “There she is now, your three o’clock. Do try to remember your code phrase this time.”

And then he’s quiet, listening, instead of prattling on. Bond appreciates it, even though he doesn’t really mind the man’s inane chatter. He’s gotten used to having a little voice in his ear at all hours and all times, no matter how inconvenient. Last month, he forgot to take the bud out before he took a shower. 

As far as he can tell, neither of them batted an eyelash at the experience. 

He turns subtly to watch the other agent approach. There are three women coming from that direction at the moment. One of them is short, dark skinned and wrinkled, far too old to be fit for this mission. The other one is a tall, willowy sort, but he dismisses her, too, on grounds of her not setting his teeth on edge from afar, the way Americans do. It’s not very professional, but his teeth are usually good indicators of these things.

Number three it is, then. Short, blonde, a well toned body, a sunny disposition. She carries a bag slung securely across her chest, keeping her hands free, and her loose dress allows for running and fighting. The practicality is offset by jingling bracelets and big sunglasses, both of which are designed to make her look harmless and sweet. 

Bond takes three seconds to judge her as probably-competent-but-still-woefully-American, while she, undoubtedly, comes to similar conclusions about him.

She halts at his table, smiles. “Hi,” she greets. Then she rolls her eyes and asks, robotically, “May I borrow a tissue? I have allergies.”

He snorts a little but dutifully returns, “I’m sorry. I only carry handkerchiefs.”

“Congratulations,” Q snipes from across the globe. “You managed to remember your line.”

With a little laugh, she flings herself into the empty chair across from him and says, “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? You’d think my people would trust me to spot you in a crowd full of tourists.”

“Yes,” Bond answers, fully aware that ‘his people’ are listening on the other end of his earwig. 

She orders a coffee in perfect Spanish, adjusts her bag to sit in her lap without taking it off and then asks, “You’re up to speed?”

“Yes.”

“Ohh, I got a chatty one! This is going to be fun. I’ll just keep talking at you until you snap and either backchat or try to strangle me!”

Reluctantly, Bond finds himself charmed. It alarms him.

+

An hour later they check into the holiday resort as Mr. and Mrs. Jonathon Baker. He’s a British banker, she’s his American society wife. They are very much in love, as evidenced by the hand she keeps on his arse at all times. 

At least she’s doing a better job at the reception than a certain other woman he once worked with at a hotel, but he dismisses the thought decisively because there is no poker here and absolutely no similarity between Vesper and Summers.

And anyway, he’s done with these sorts of entanglements. Orphans make the best recruits because they have no connections, no human contact to tether them. Bond understands M’s reasoning now. 

Oh, they’ll fuck before the job is over. Summers is as charmed by his persona as he is by hers and it’ll be good fun, but that’ll be the end of it. 

Upstairs, Amy – John’s wife – tips the bellboy and sends him off with a cheery wave before closing the door and starting to meticulously check every inch of the room for surveillance or other surprises. 

Bond makes note of all the places she uses to secret blades away. Not guns, he notices, only blades. 

Interesting. 

While she does the main room, he does the bathroom and then they trade off, neither one trusting the other. 

They meet on the bed half an hour later. 

“So,” she says, and she still sounds as bouncy- happy as she did outside. “How do you want to play this?”

Deferral. How nice.

“Tourists getting lost has a certain charm, doesn’t it?”

“We can sneak around for a place to screw,” she agrees, throwing her hair over her shoulder with a wicked grin.

“Look for a purported indoor pool.”

“Big word! You’re paying for dinner!”

He snorts. “A shower first, I think.”

“Is that an invitation?” she actually winks.

“Oh, good lord,” Q complains.

He rolls to his feet, smirking at her over one shoulder, unbuttoning his shirt as he goes. “No.”

She laughs behind him, free and easy and he can’t tell how much is fake and how much is real. Just the way it should be between two professional liars.

He closes the bathroom door only most of the way and lets his travel clothes drop to the floor without care, turning the shower to scalding. Once he’s done, he wraps a towel around his waist and stalks back into the main room, where she sits and patiently watches him without the slightest tell on her face, not even the tiniest twitch. 

She only climbs to her feet once he’s dressed, taking her turn in the shower and leaving him to scout the hotel, Q riding shotgun in his ear.   
The hacker uses the pictures Bond sends from his phone – acting the eager tourist – to identify quite a few shady characters at the buffet and pool, one of them being Walsh herself, along with what looks to be private security.

A snag. Not unexpected, but still a snag. 

The auction, he finds out through a little snooping, is set for tomorrow evening. Plenty of time until then. Great.

“Are you complaining about free time, 007?”

“I’m complaining about being married for forty-eight hours,” he drawls.

Q’s silent for a beat, then his usual chatter picks back up. “This whole bloody thing is too easy,” he complains, pretends that’s why he’s feeling like razor blades tonight. 

He stalks back upstairs, finds Summers in a forest green dress with golden heels, barely any jewellery to be found on her. She’s all golden bright summer and the sight of her, so unlike the sight of Vesper, clears the fog of ugly déjà vu that’s been settling over him.

He changes shirts again in front of her, watches her watching him.

She bites her lip in an intentional tell, asking, “Are you seducing me, dear?”

“We have time to kill,” he observes, nonchalantly. 

“And you think giving me googly eyes is going to make my panties magically drop?”

He hates Americanisms. 

“Is it working?”

She gives him a considering look like she knows what he’s doing, distracting himself with the nearest shiny object. “Ask me later.” Then. “You found out when the auction is?”

“Tomorrow, after dinner.”

“Great. I need to call my handler.”

He watches her fish a phone from her clutch purse, surprised that she’s not plugged in the same way he is. Q notices, too.

“That is irregular,” he comments, distractedly, and then start tapping away at his computer, undoubtedly tracing the call. 

“Witch,” Summers says in greeting. “The weather’s amazing, you should be here. Maybe you and Wolf boy can take a few days off. You need vacay-time. My business thing isn’t until tomorrow, after dinner. You could make it down here in time for us to catch a few waves.... Yeah, I know you don’t surf. I know you don’t like sunshine. I know you’re a redhead. Yeah, okay. No, I promise. I’ll be good, mom. Seriously. Fuck off, girlfriend.”

She hangs up. Bond has to admit he has no idea how much of that call was faked for the sake of staying in character and how much was real. He has a feeling the parts are about equal.

“Witch and Wolf?” Q asks. “Now that’s interesting. They are, arguably, the CIA’s finest techs.”

“Do I sense professional envy?” Bond asks, smirking.

“Oh, do shut up.”

Summers points at her ear. He nods.

“Good to know you come with inbuilt cavalry on speed dial.”

Finished with his suit, John offers Amy his arm. “Shall we, love?”

She beams. “We shall.”

+

Q guides them to a secluded table on the patio of one of the resort’s seven restaurants. Dr. Walsh is, unfortunately, dining in tonight. “And the CCTV is... off,” the tech remarks after a moment.

John passes the information on with a smile after ordering wine for them both. 

“High-handed,” she comments on his choice of drinks and not at all on the second part. 

Instead she leans back, relaxed as you please, and says, “You have orders to destroy it, don’t you?”

Apparently, she’ll take his word on the surveillance.

It’s a rhetoric question. “Yes.”

She gives a decisive nod. “Good.”

Five minutes later, she picks a different thread of conversation, one that’s easier to couch in codes and hints. “Have you ever considered retiring, John?”

He rolls his shoulders. “Have you, love?”

“I asked first.”

Surprising even himself, he goes with the truth. “Yes. I didn’t like the idea. It’s who I am.”

“Me, too,” she agrees, but no more than that. “Straight out of the military, yes?”

Again, he nods. It’s not exactly a rarity, for men like him to be recruited out of the army. 

“And what made you enlist?”

He smiles at her, sharp as razorblades, and far uglier. She may be easy to talk to, but he’s not telling her his secrets. Although, he guesses, the expression on his face is an answer in itself. She understands him, either way. “Nowhere else to go, yes?”

Not without getting arrested within a year. There’s a finite number of career options with a man as chockfull of rage as James Bond. Diversion.

“And you? You got here a different way.” She was never military.

“I did,” she agrees, easily, cheeks dimpling with her smile. “But I wouldn’t want to rob your imaginary friend of his fun.”

“Imaginary friend,” Q grumbles, “that’s not even...,” he trails off. “Challenge accepted.”

Bond, under the veneer of John, wonders why a CIA agent would go to the trouble of putting an MI-6 hacker on her own trail the way Summers just did. 

John just raises his glass. “Here’s to landing here.”

She clinks her wine against his, smile every bit as sharp as his own. 

+

Back in their hotel room, they go to town on the Bond’s photographs and the tapes Q sends, identifying people and grouping them together. Either of their tech departments could have done it faster, but computers couldn’t yet read body language and they didn’t know nearly as much about old connections and half forgotten rumours as two old hats like Bond and Summers. 

Besides, they were trying to predict the most likely buyers, not set up a sting to arrest them. 

“This one,” Summers points out, tapping one glossy print-out. “Algerian. He has a nasty feud going on with this one.” Another pictures. “He’ll outbid the other one out of spite, if nothing else.”

“Personal grudge?”

“Rumour has is, there was a deflowered sister involved. Along with a few million dollars.”

“Which one started the feud?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she admits with a shrug, shunting the pictures to one side, grabbing another. “Never seen this guy before. You know him?”

He takes a closer look, shrugs. “South African mercenary. He could be here for anyone.”

“That guy’s South African, too. Connection?”

Bond studies the still frames. “I think I saw them at the pool bar together. You can check, but I’d rather that one didn’t see me.”

“Sounds like a good story.”

“It involved goats.”

“Definitely a good story, then.”

They work until well past midnight, sorting, awarding points on a merit system that’s mostly made up of experience and their guts, and end up with three likely buyers. 

Q sets up traces for all of them, so the agents can go after them if the grab before the auction fails. 

Eventually, they both start to droop and as there’s no reason to fight against it, they go to bed, entwined like the lovers they’re pretending to be. He calls her love, she calls him honey and when she falls asleep with his ear over his heart, he wants to snap her neck.

+

Bond wakes to the sound of a phone vibrating close by and watches, through slitted eyes, as Summers stands and grabs the mobile, retreating to the bathroom. 

He waits for a ten-count, the follows on silent feet.

“Are you sure?” she asks, quietly.

“What does Giles say? He’s... he’s still my mentor, Will. What does he... when? Do you know who? I’m going to...,” she sounds viciously angry. 

Someone died.

Someone definitely died. 

“I am... yeah. Okay. Alright. I... thanks. Make sure you and the others aren’t involved in this, will you? I’m fine. I knew this was happening. Yeah. You, too.”

She hangs up. 

By the time she makes her way back to bed, Bond is tangled in the sheets again, seemingly fast asleep. 

He knows she doesn’t buy it when she climbs on top of him, instead of back into her side of the bed. Suspended on her knees, she patiently waits for him to turn over before planting her hands on either side of his head for a long, filthy kiss.

When she pulls back, most of her weight is on him and she looks flushed. Flushed, and angry.

“Who?” he asks, doesn’t do her the disservice of playing dumb. 

It’s strange how, sometimes, in this business, where no-one knows anyone and everyone lies, two perfect strangers can be closer than lovers.

“My old mentor. My damn saviour. They... I know who did it and I can’t do a damn thing about it because...”

Grabbing a handful of her hair, he pulls her down again and kisses her silent. She lets him, fingers scrabbling at his drawstring trousers, even as he goes for her flimsy top. 

They fuck, harsh and twisted and as what they are: strangers.

They don’t speak, filling the silence with grunts and groans and, somewhere halfway through, Bond hears a snuffled sounds of surprise – Q waking and finding his charge screwing the CIA agent. He shushes the younger man and the woman in his arms both and gets back down to business, thinking, absently, _This is how monsters grieve._

In the morning, they both bear teeth marks and bruises and Summers spends an hour sharpening all her weapons, dead look in her eye.

“Can you do it?” he asks around noon, not because he needs to know, but because he needs to pull her out of it. 

She nods, cold and capable and he thinks of a wrought iron elevator in Venice and cold water. 

+

“Buffy Anne Summers,” Q announces sometime after lunch. “Born and bred in California, currently 30 years of age. Kidnapped by former CIA agent Dominic Merrick at age fourteen.”

Bond listens closely, steps never faltering as he takes another tour of the hotel. He hates waiting. 

“Merrick pitched a programme to the directors back in the early nineties. He was a paranoid bastard and proposed to take ‘non-suspicious persons’ and train them as agents for infiltration and wet work. He was sure the US were about to be overrun by hostile forces and needed to fight back. Classic paranoid schizophrenia, if you ask me. Instead of the usual ‘super soldier’ spiel the Americans are so fond of, he wanted to train children and teenagers, preferably girls, because no-one would ever suspect them.

“As you can imagine, he was shot down soundly and fired for good measure. He moved to a remote cabin in the woods, got more paranoid and set out to prove his theory. He kidnapped chosen candidates from all over the States – seventeen confirmed – and trained them as spies.”

Bond, who was a consenting adult when his training with MI-6 started, shudders internally at the idea of children going through the same processes. 

“By the time the CIA finally caught on to what one of their finest was doing, fifteen of the victims were dead. Of the surviving two, a thirteen-year-old by the name of Dana killed herself. The other one was... well, by Merrick’s standards, she completed the training, leaving the CIA with a sixteen-year-old, fully-trained killer on their hands.”

“They integrated her,” Bond says. It’s not really a guess. 

“They integrated her. There was some controversy, but everyone agreed they couldn’t let her back on the street as she was. Disposing of her was impossible with the media coverage and locking up would have been futile.”

The prison that holds people like Bond and Summers has yet to be built. 

“So they kept her.”

“Rupert Giles, a desk jockey of some importance, worked the case and fought for her. He became her handler until he retired a few years ago. My sources say he was murdered yesterday in his home in Virginia.”

“I know,” Bond says and then goes to pull out the wig so he can think in peace. 

Before he does, Q adds, “Oh, and 007? Merrick named his madness.”

“What did he call it?”

“The Slayer Programme.”

Interesting.

+

 

... And this is roughly where I came to the conclusion that you cannot properly cross James Bond with Buffy. Ever. At all. No, sir. But anyway, in the end they bone. Because I said so.


	4. Annis takes her toll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles is one of the Fae and wee!Derek likes him more than he should.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure Reena Jenkins helped me cook that up. I came to her with idea of Fae Stiles and she provided a soundtrack and mythology about child eating fae and off I went.

\+ 

Derek was lost. 

He didn’t want to admit it, but it was true. 

He was lost.

In the woods. 

Laura was going to laugh at him _forever_ when he got back home. What werewolf got lost in the woods?

He’d only meant to nip outside for a quick run, just to get rid of some energy because he was feeling jittery in his borrowed skin. Human skin, Mom always said. It was his human skin and it was his right skin.

“We’re sometimes wolves, honey, but we’re still human. You’re meant to be like this,” she’d say, squeezing his hands, or his feet, or some other part he didn’t have as a wolf, smelling of love and worry. 

Because Derek wasn’t _normal_. 

Eric and Laura, his big siblings, and even Cora, the baby, had all been born normal. But not Derek. No, Derek had been born furry and on four paws, blind and tiny and _wolf_ and Mom kept telling him that it was okay that he sometimes didn’t want to be human, but that he needed to learn and he _hated_.

His skin was too big when he was human, too flabby and wide and naked. He felt like he was wrapped in a warm, wet blanket when he was human. Everything was slow and cumbersome and dull and he itched and he had to wear clothes and use a fork at dinner and speak.

He never had to speak when he was wolf. 

Still, he tried to be good because Mom and Dad smelled happier when he had feet and fingers. This year, he was even allowed to go to school because he rarely shifted anymore. But sometimes the itching got too much and he _had to_ change. 

He’d only meant to nip out for half an hour, to run on proper paws for a while and then return home, slip his clothes back on and go inside before anyone noticed he was gone. The baby wailed loud enough to cover his absence, easy. 

But there’d been such a strange, sweet scent on the breeze, like campfire and cinnamon and sugar and something bitter after it, like Dad’s candy sometimes had, which was why Derek didn’t steal it anymore. He’d followed it, deeper and deeper into the woods, away from the house and then away from Hale territory, until he’d lost the scent across a little brook and now here he was. 

It was dark and he was lost and it was starting to rain and Mom was going to _kill him_ and he was scared. Laura would laugh, but he could admit it, even if only to himself. 

Derek Hale was scared. 

All the stories Eric had told him, about hunters and traps and monsters in the woods, about vampires and bear traps made from steel, came back with a vengeance, and Derek could feel his body shaking, with cold and exhaustion and fear. 

It had been barely dinner time when he’d left the house. Now the moon was high in the sky. He must have been gone for hours and the rain was steadily washing away his own scent trail. 

He whined, low and weak, and huddled under a scraggly bush, trying to find shelter from the downpour. His paws were already sinking into the mud made from soft forest loam and heavy rain. He shook one paw clean, sunk in further with the other three, turned and turned, trying to find a drier spot, his own scent on the leaves, a light in the distance. 

Anything. 

He knew there had to be a road somewhere – Uncle Peter always complained that there were roads everywhere in the preserve –but he was scared of going there. 

“There are no wolves in California, Derek, always remember that. If the humans ever catch you, they might lock you up. If hunters find you, they’ll immediately know what you are. Don’t let yourself be seen by humans, do you understand?”

Yes, Alpha. 

He found no trace of any of the things he desperately wanted, so he curled further into himself decided to hold still. Eventually, pack would come. 

Mom would be _so mad_ , but they would come. 

Pack always came for you. That’s what pack meant. You never had to be alone. Even if you were wolfborn and sometimes had trouble with words or thumbs, they came for you. 

He just had to wait. 

Somewhere above him, thunder flashed and a tree crashed. 

Derek yowled.

+

He heard footsteps. 

He heard footsteps and he didn’t recognize them. They were light, like someone small and fast would make, but far apart, like a man’s heavy stride, and Derek tried to parse their direction, their owner, but all he could think of were humans armed with guns and traps and he felt himself freeze in something approaching panic. 

He didn’t want to die. 

He didn’t want his pack to die. He didn’t want – 

“Well, what do we have here?”

Derek howled as a hand suddenly gripped him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him out from under his bush with ruthless strength. 

His paws left the ground even as he scrambled for purchase, snarling and twisting to get away from a hand that didn’t falter or even slow down as he went up and up and up and he snapped his teeth at nothing as he was suddenly spun around in midair and deposited against a warm, broad chest. 

Immediately, he sunk his claws into every part of the human he could reach, digging deep, scratching, biting, fighting. 

The human – man – laughed and brought an arm down across Derek’s back, applying gentle pressure until he was flattened against the man’s body, unable to fight anymore. 

He didn’t seem fazed at all by the blood Derek could smell on him. He was small, but he was a wolf and he wasn’t going down without a fight. 

“Calm down, little guy,” the man scolded, almost softly, “I’m not out to hurt you. But this is no place for a little wolf like you, not tonight.”

Derek whined and then, tentatively, stopped struggling. After a beat or two, when no attack came, he relaxed a bit further, leaning back as far as the man’s hold allowed to look at him. 

He wasn’t really a man at all. He looked like he was around Uncle Peter’s age and he was nineteen, which Derek thought was old, but Mom said was ‘barely old enough to not need diapers anymore’. 

His eyes were a soft brown, almost like wolf eyes, and his hair was a wild mess, like he’d been running through the woods, too. He had a lot of dark moles on his face and his nose looked funny. He was smiling and there were teeth in it, but humans always smiled like that. 

They didn’t know that teeth meant anger. Which was silly, because what else would teeth mean, but humans were funny. They spent their whole lives in bodies that were wet blankets; of course they didn’t know about a lot of things, with their dull senses and their too big skins, slow and squishy. 

Their teeth couldn’t even chew meat right. They had to cook it. 

But that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting (scary) part was that the man’s pupils weren’t round, or even slitted, like those of the cat that sometimes came creeping around the house. His pupils were jagged, like stars, and blacker than Derek’s pelt.

They were scary. 

They were scary and the man obviously wasn’t human, because humans didn’t have eyes like that, and so Derek went very, very still. He didn’t want to make the man angry.

Like he was reading Derek’s thoughts, the man laughed again. “Hey, it’s alright. I don’t have a problem with werewolves, generally. No need to be scared.”

Definitely not human. Derek was torn between relief and renewed fear because if the boy wasn’t human, then what _was_ he? And was he going to help Derek, or hurt him, or simply leave him here?

“You are a werewolf, aren’t you?”

Derek considered not responding. If he played animal, maybe… but there was something in the other’s strange eyes, something that told him that lying was a bad idea. That he would get punished for it. It wasn’t much, that feeling, just a shiver down his spine, like dipping his feet in the pond in November, but it was enough. He knew to listen to his instincts. 

He nodded. 

“And such a young one, too. I’ve rarely met a shifter who could shift completely, much less one so young. How old are you, pup?”

Derek was seven, but it wasn’t like he had vocal chords right now, so he simply looked at the man. Sometimes adults were really dumb.

Laughter. It was happy laughter, like when someone told a good joke, but underneath it was something that put Derek’s hackled up. He bared his teeth, just a little, was about to growl, when the man’s free hand suddenly surged up, one finger pointed, and he said, “Let’s see,” right before poking Derek in the forehead. 

Where the finger made contact, Derek’s skin suddenly felt unbearably hot. The sensation spread from there, all down his head and into his jaw, over his shoulders to his back and the rest of his body. For a moment, it felt like a warm wind, like crawling into his bed after a long day on two legs, but then it got hotter and then it got unbearable, like a fire lit on his skin, like his fur war burning, and his bones underneath were about to catch fire. He whined, squirmed, tried to escape the sensation, but there was no escaping it, no relief.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the fire passed. 

The little wolf hung, panting, from the strange not-human’s arms, shivering and twitching, occasionally, from the aftershocks. 

“Whoops,” he heard. “That might have been a bit much.” The boy clucked his tongue. “I keep forgetting how fragile you mortals are. But you – “

He shifted his grip on Derek, hauling him further up his chest until they were eye to eye. “You’re not quite so mortal, are you? There’s more beast than human in you and your skin… They make you live in the wrong one, don’t they? Poor little wolf, pressed into human shape. They don’t get it, how it feels, like wearing someone else’s underwear all the time and no shower can wash off the itchy, ugly feeling of it, because it’s inside of you and some days you’re sitting at the breakfast table and the butter knife looks stupidly tempting because with it, you could scrape it _off_ , until the real parts are back where they belong, am I right? It’s like fucking someone you’re not even remotely attracted to, only that someone is yourself and you can’t sneak out in the dead of night, because it’s your own damn body.”

He shuddered, rolling his shoulders, shaking something off, and Derek felt like he was falling, because _yes, yes, yes_ , it was true, it was all true even if he didn’t understand some of what the man had said, it was still _true_. He yipped his agreement and pushed closer, pressing his cold nose into the man’s cheek. 

_Yes_.

Above him, the not-human sighed, heavy and sad. “Poor thing,” he muttered, big hand weighing on Derek’s skull, pushing him back into his chest. 

Holding on.

Derek wasn’t scared anymore. 

+

After a while, they started walking. Or the man started walking and Derek wasn’t being asked his opinion on the matter, which was okay, because he was suddenly bone-deep tired. Hours in the woods, getting lost, the rain and cold, the… strange fire the man had sent through him and then the revelation that someone felt _just like him_ had left him tired. 

He was only seven. Mom always said children needed a lot of sleep and, for once, Derek agreed. He wanted home. 

He didn’t realize he was whining until a broad hand stroked down his back. “You’re a Hale, aren’t you, little wolf?”

A nod. 

“Then home should be…,” he twisted his fingers strangely, flicked them outwards and a little ball of greenish blue light rose from them to hand, suspended, a foot or so above them, a little to the left. 

When Derek’s new friend moved, the light moved with him. “This’ll show us the way to your pack. All we gotta do is follow.”

And they walked. 

There wasn’t much more talk and Derek kept drooping off before remembering that he didn’t really know the man and shouldn’t fall asleep. He thought about Mom and Dad and how mad they would be. 

They’d probably ground him.

And make him be human. 

He buried his nose in the crook of an elbow and watched the dark woods pass them by. 

They walked for a long time, but the man neither slowed down, nor took a break. He just walked and walked and, after a while, Derek noticed that he never had to step over fallen logs or avoid underbrush. He never tripped into foxholes or had to bend branches out of his way. He just walked, in a straight line and the forest was all around them, but never in front of them. 

It was like it moved aside for the man to walk through. 

Derek leaned back in his cradle of arms and studied him. That was not normal. Derek had spent all his life in these woods and they didn’t move. Trees didn’t move.

He knew that his rescuer was special, somehow. He’d used magic on Derek before and it had felt hottightpowerful, like when Mom used her Alpha voice, but stronger. It had been _inside of him._

Still, doing magic on a person seemed possible. But now he was doing magic on the whole forest and that was not normal, so Derek studied him hard. Sometimes, the man’s eyes went funny, almost as bright as a wolf’s, but in the wrong color. 

Alpha was red, beta blue or gold. That was the first lesson any wolf learnt. The man’s eyes were gold, too, but a darker, almost orange one, and sometimes they looked almost black. Dark light. His eyes looked like dark light. 

And his ears were weird, too. When he was shifting, wolf to human or back, sometimes his ears got really funny in between. Pointy. The man’s ears were like that and he made no noise. 

Nothing about him made any noise. Not even the needles and leaves under his feet. 

Something like unease flickered through Derek, because everything made some sort of noise. Only the best predators could be almost completely silent. But never like this. If he hadn’t seen the man, hadn’t felt his chest and his arms and his breath on his fur, he wouldn’t have known he was there. 

He made _no sound_. 

The little wolf squirmed a bit, suddenly skittish, but the human shaped thing just chuckled and held him tighter. 

“Can you feel it?” he asked, after a long time of silent walking. He inhaled deeply. “Borderlands.” 

Derek looked around and realized it was true. They were almost back on Hale land. He knew those trees over there, and that rock formation, half buried under moss and a fallen tree. 

Only moments later, he heard howling. 

Pack! 

Family! 

Alpha! 

He threw is head back answered the call. Immediately, all the voices turned toward him. Running. He could feel them closing in. 

Abruptly, his world tilted sideways. He scrambled for purchase as he was dropped to the ground once again, but it was no use. He barely managed to land right side down, nevermind on his paws. 

The man crouched down in front of him. “This is where we part ways, little wolf. It was fun meeting you! Next time, you can find me.” He smirked with his teeth and patted Derek on the head before standing. 

Derek shook himself, down to the tip of his tail, shaking off the man’s echoes on his pelt. He’d been terribly warm and comfortable and dry and suddenly everything was wet and cold again and the trees were closing in, like the magic that had kept them away had stopped. 

He snapped his teeth. 

The man laughed out loud as he took a step back. Then, half turned away already, he stopped and threw Derek a narrow-eyes look over one shoulder. 

“Do you have a name, little wolf?” 

Derek nodded, baffled. Of course he had a name. Everyone had a name, didn’t they? 

He received a single nod in response. “My name is Stiles,” the stranger said and melted into the darkness abruptly. 

Seconds later, Alpha burst through the trees and Derek cowered in front of his angryscared mother, too busy to try and see which way the ma – Stiles had gone. 

“Derek!” she barked, though fangs, “Oh, you are in so much trouble!” 

He whined low in his throat, neck bared, belly on the ground and Alpha sighed, shifting back into human form. She picked him up by the scruff and shook him hard before hauling him into her arms and squeezing tightly. “Never scare me like that again,” she ordered, quietly, into the thickest part of his fur. “I was terrified, puppy. We all were.” 

On cue, the rest of the adult pack member crashed through the underbrush (the forest doesn’t move for them) and hands, some clawed, some not, nudged him from all directions, scent marking, ascertaining that he’s alright. Checking in. 

His Dad pressed a damp kiss to his head, right where the skull was closest to the skin, and he smelled like fear and worry and Derek buried his nose in Mom’s shoulder and whined apology. 

“Jesus, kid,” Uncle Peter said, tugging on his tail. “Is it really that hard to stay on two legs?” 

“Leave him, Peter,” Mom ordered, turning back the way they’d all come. “Let’s just get him home. I’ll save the yelling for human-shaped ears.” To make her point, she pulled on one of Derek’s fuzzy wolf ears before falling into a jog. The rest of the pack closed rank around her. 

\+ 

The run back to the house didn’t take more than a few minutes, or maybe it just felt that way, because Derek knew what was waiting for him there. 

As soon as they hit the mudroom, the rest of the pack dispersed, leaving Mom, who was Alpha again, and Dad. 

Alpha dropped him to the floor. “Shift,” she ordered, flatly, and when Derek wasn’t fast enough, she pushed at him until he twisted himself back into that other shape, with the flabby skin. 

After a few moments of hard breathing, he was kneeling naked on the floor in front of his alpha, neck bared. 

“Sorry, Mom,” he muttered around a clumsy, human tongue. “I just wanted to go for quick run.” 

A sigh. “You were gone for five hours.” 

“I got lost.” 

“You were on familiar ground Derek, don’t lie to me.” 

He looked up briefly, before letting himself fall on his butt, curling in his legs. He missed his tail. “I got lost. But there was a man who brought me back.” 

\+ 

... Derek grows up with Stiles around and everyone disapproves but Derek adores him because Stiles understands what it's like when your skin is wrong. Kate happens and Stiles saves the Hales and takes Derek away to his kingdom and there was something about Stiles being half fae only and he treats Derek the way fae are known to treat their pets and Scott is there, too, because Stiles killed Allison, and he tells Derek that the only way to kill the evil fae is to find out his name. Derek betrays Stiles' trust by getting Scott into the palace because Stiles _is_ out of control. He finds out the name but when the shit goes down it doesn't work. All seems lost until Derek remembers the way Stiles used to talk about living in hte wrong skin and realizes that 'Stiles' is the name given to him by his human father and the one he always considered his real name. So he invokes it and kills Stiles, setting him free, and lives the rest of his life as a sad, sad cinnamon roll. 

Plot is exhausting, yo. 


End file.
